Chapter 477 It seems...maybe...perhaps...it really is true.

It seems... probably... maybe... there really is no one speaking.

The atmosphere was frighteningly quiet.

The reason it was so quiet in the conference room wasn't because they were ashamed of being caught red-handed for falsifying data.

You have to understand.

Although in various political stunts and propaganda, to maintain the invincible image of a superpower, falsifying things has already become their traditional skill.

After all, back in the Cold War era, in order to crush a powerful opponent in the space race, they even dared to stage something as world-renowned as the moon landing in a studio, pulling up curtains, setting up sand table models, and faking it through carefully choreographed light and shadow effects.

Such outrageous maneuvers are practically endless in the top-secret archives of the Dead Corner Building.

As long as they can maintain their hegemony, they can twist black into white with that mouth of theirs.

But!!!

This time the situation is completely different!!!

The military bigwigs sitting there were all breathing heavily, their eyes bloodshot.

This time, they would swear to God that they really hadn't falsified the battle results!!!

In order to completely wipe out the air power of Hassan and his ragtag group in the Middle East.

The Joint Task Force had practically deployed all their elites over the past few days, with hundreds of sorties of heavy attack aircraft and stealth bombers taking off and landing.

Hanging under the wings of every fighter jet were precision-guided bombs and bunker busters that cost hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars each.

Those were all killing machines built with the hard-earned money of taxpayers.

A Marine general sitting on the left side of the long table had a vein throbbing on his forehead.

He turned his head and looked with suspicious eyes at the politicians in charge of intelligence and propaganda.

"Could it be that your propaganda department, in order to make the press conference look more shocking, privately hired a Hollywood special effects team to over-edit the aerial photos?"

Hearing this baseless attempt to shift the blame, the boss of the propaganda department stood up on the spot and retorted loudly.

"Bullshit! All the photos we sent to the media were the original images transmitted back by your frontline reconnaissance planes; not a single pixel was altered!"

"Who knows what kind of ghostly things your pampered soldiers flying in the sky actually bombed?"

Seeing that an internal fight was about to break out, a white-haired general finally couldn't hold back anymore.

He forcefully pushed away the leather chair behind him, pressed his hands on the table, and stood up straight. He slammed the table angrily and roared: "We didn't falsify anything, so what on earth is going on here!?!"

With the loud sound of the wooden board being struck, the arguing in the entire conference room was instantly suppressed.

The Old General's chest heaved violently, and his wrinkled fingers tapped heavily on the table.

"The ledger for the logistics warehouse is right here!"

"The records of hundreds and thousands of tons of high explosives dropped are all documented!"

"We blew up the targets, we created huge craters, that's a fact!!!"

"But who can explain to me why there isn't even a trace of metal debris reaction in the spectral analysis chart provided by this damn Big White Bear Reporter?"

'Could it be that all those incredibly expensive bombs we dropped turned into fireworks in mid-air, just to scorch the sand on the ground black?' This thought popped into his mind.

He was speechless to the extreme.

In the oppressive silence, no one could answer the Old General's question.

Everyone felt that this matter was absurd to the extreme.

Various outrageous guesses were put forward, only to be debunked at lightning speed.

Someone suspected that the optical radar had suffered a collective hardware failure in the high-temperature desert environment, mistaking mirages or certain special ores for targets.

But an Expert immediately stood up to refute this.

With cross-detection from multiple fighter jets at different altitudes and angles, plus advanced algorithmic filtering, it was impossible for identical visual bugs to appear simultaneously.

Others guessed whether the enemy had mastered some kind of advanced stealth coating, or high-tech that could dissolve and evaporate fighter wreckage the moment the bomb fell.

This suggestion, which even science fiction movies wouldn't dare to film casually, was met with looks of idiocy from his colleagues.

If Hassan and his group of guerrillas, who usually couldn't even scrape together air defense radar, could master this kind of black technology that even Country A's laboratories couldn't produce, they would have ruled the world long ago.

Would they still need to hide in underground bunkers eating sand?

The argument fell into a vicious cycle, which was despairing.

And there is a saying: once you eliminate all the impossibilities, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth...

"Since our pilots didn't see wrong, the radar didn't malfunction, and the bombs were indeed dropped."

A senior official from the intelligence department sitting in the corner spoke up:

"And we absolutely didn't tamper with the post-processed photos."

"Then... could it be that it wasn't us falsifying things, but that those militants used fake items to deceive us."

Hearing this theory, everyone looked at each other.

This was the head of the Defense Logistics Department.

He also pondered: "Yeah, how could they deceive us? Could it be... that they painted fighter jets on the ground?"

As soon as he finished speaking, the air in the entire conference room went silent.

In fact, their first reaction was to find it absurd.

But when they substituted the setting of "patterns painted on the ground" into all the previous doubts, all those inexplicable contradictions suddenly formed a perfect logical puzzle at this moment!!!

Why was there no shadow? Because it was just a 2D image!!!

Why was there no metal debris? Because, damn it, it was essentially just a pile of industrial paint!!!

It seems... probably... maybe... it really was...

Those ragtag people who were backward and ignorant in their eyes had actually used this kind of visual deception, a technique of dimensional reduction, to play their entire massive and expensive war machine like a monkey!!!

This thought made the entire conference room so quiet that a pin drop could be heard.

A layer of cold sweat broke out on everyone's backs.